Some Time With...Adria Later (Part 2)

Published Feb 23, 2024, 1:00 AM

Join us as we dig deeper into the incredible life, and resume, of Full House’s on-set teacher, Adria Later.

Welcome back to how Rue Tanaritos. We are back with the second part of our interview with our studio teacher from Full House, Adria Later. Adria is giving us all a unique glimpse into what it was really like behind the scenes of the show and being the baby wrangler for Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. So buckle up and get ready, here's part two with Adria. Now, Jodie, I think you and I went to regular public school in addition to being schooled on the set.

So do you remember did you go to like your.

First period of the day or did you do all of your schooling on the set and just go to school on the hiatus weeks.

I went to school, I mean cause I was in elementary school, so we didn't really have like periods yet. First second, it was like I went to school until about lunch, which was like eleven forty five or twelve ish, and then my mom would pick me up and I would work on my script in the car and I would drive, you know, from because we lived in Orange County, drive from Orange County to Sony Studios, which was in Culver City, which at that time in La traffic was such that you could make that journey in about forty five to fifty minutes, and amazing. That would not be happening now, that would you wouldn't You would not.

Be able to do that now.

But I was so fortunate because you know, it got to like have quote unquote normal friends and normal school stuff and be plugged in a little bit to the classroom, and then I would take that stuff, you know for Thursdays and Fridays on tape days when we had to be there longer hours. I would take all of those days, all those days, work for Thursday and Friday and work on it on set.

Now, the reason you were able to do that and go to school for those few hours and then come to set was that your time on set could only be three and a half hours because if you do go to your own school, you can't then come to work and work eight hours. So on the day so you went to your own school, you could only be on this head for three and a half hours, so you would come from to run through. That was it. But on Friday when we were taping, you had to be there all day because we needed an eight and a half hour day on yourself.

Okay, huh, Okay, Yeah, there's all those like little nuances and things of you know, how often kids need breaks and how like how long they can work for Like Ashley and Mary Kate at the time, what is like for young kids, It's like twenty minutes in front of the camera, right, but broken up into.

Yeah, I mean when they're infants. Actually they read it at eight months old, so I think at that time, I didn't have to look back at my book. I think it's they're allowed on the set for four hours, you know, working four hours. I think it's two hours of work and two hours of break. When they're infants, like under six months old, you know, they can only work twenty minute increment, right, But once they were you know, because they were eight months old, they were they fell into that category of being allowed there for four and a half hours.

Got it.

And the reason we use twins is because what they could have done. They could have brought let's say, Mary kateen at eight o'clock in the morning and brought in and Ashley brought in or her at noon and then you know, get an eight hour day out of it. But because we flipped them back and forth and back and forth every other scene. They were both there for their whole a lot of times. So four and a half hours, you know, gettle and then it goes up to six and a half hours when they hit I think I forget five, five or six years old, and you know, the goes up. But they chose not to split their call, which they do on most feature films and most TV shows, is they'll give a staggered call on twins to get a longer period of time on the set with them.

Right, But then you're but then you're sort of you know, you got to keep your fingers crossed that that one particular twin is in the.

Mood to be doing it.

It's kind of risky.

Yeah.

Yeah, if you tried to do something right about nap time, forget it, it's not happening.

And they were such good natured babies, so.

They really, yeah, they absolutely were, and they just became such a part of the family.

When the two of you too, I mean you treated them like little sisters, you know, oh yeah, burn your back on them. You played with them, you sat with them, you talked to them.

I was very close with Ashley Mary Kate.

I mean sort of like how Andrea and I were close, like I, you know, sort of look to Andrey and Candice is like the older ones, Like I definitely was that to Ashley Mary Kate and oh yeah I had they would come to our house on weekends and all that kind of stuff. But when you had such a huge part in really you know, creating the fun of the Michelle character in you know, them repeating the lines and doing all that.

Stuff, when did you kind.

Of realize like, oh, they were like this was becoming more than just them on the show.

But because you traveled with them quite a bit, right.

I want to say it wasn't until they were five years old. I think it is when they did their first movie of the Week with Jeff. Jeff wrote a television movie of the Week for them, followed by I think two other movies of the right, and then they went on to do a whole video collection of spy, you know, little Spy.

Right.

They worked, They worked a lot, They worked really hard.

Yeah hard, Yeah, they definitely did.

But yeah, it was like five, They were like five when they started doing all this, So it was a little more towards like the fourth or fifth season exactly exactly.

I know, after the first season, first of all. After the first month or two, Jeff and I talked about this. He had them just paid as daily actors. They were not under contract, and I remember it was like, I don't know, three four, five weeks into the shooting, he said, he kid to me, He says, I guess I should put them under contract, shouldn't I?

Yeah, I think, wow, right, I had no idea.

I think originally the plan was to use babies for a certain period of time and then just flip out to older ones and liked and then season two go to a couple of five year olds. Well, they chose not to do that on Full House, which I think was the key because America absolutely those little girls grow up right in front.

Yeah, they like they watched literally, you know, Michelle go from infant to toddler to you little kid, and you know, they watched all of us sort of grow through the just in these incredible you know lengths of time of like so much, I mean, such our formative years, you know, like the things that you really remember about your childhood and so much of that.

I remember being in a restaurant during the time the Full House was on the air, and this is before you could tape shows and go home and watch them later, right right right restaurant with my family, and there was a table next to me, a whole family with several children, and all of a sudden, this mother said, oh my god, look at the time. Full House is going to start in thirty minutes. We have to leave now get the show. And they had out of that restaurant so they could go home and watch the Full House. And so I love that. I love that they were going home to watch the show.

That's amazing, so great. So I love hearing those stories.

I had a great following that show Full House for seriously.

And then in the later seasons, you know, we had more babies that you were nick We had Blake and Dylan, and so you know, we kind of started the process all over again, although they weren't the same infants where that we used different we went infants, and then I think we did skip.

There the first Nicky and Alex as infants, and then the bill points were the the toddler version of the right Nicky and all.

Right, yeah that's right, I remember. I remember the renter is.

Were you put on Nicky and Alex's duty? Then? Because Mary, Kate and Ashley were a little bit older and could kind of manage their own lines a little bit better.

At that point, they were older, and we hired another dialogue coach to work lines with them because at that time they were they were I was not coaching them with lines. They were now saying their own lines, and so he brought a dialogue coach on, Barbara Dowt, Barbara her last name, and.

She oh, yes, oh, she was my acting teacher for a while too. I loved working with.

Barbara, wonderful woman and she worked. Yeah, so that I could move on to working with Nikki and Alex. You know, the will Hoyt boys, right, Having twins on set playing brothers at the same time. Boy, that's a that's a big ask.

That Yeah, that was hard because you couldn't there was no swapping them out. It wasn't there weren't they weren't triplets or you know, there wasn't four of them. There was two of them, and both of them were on camera at the same time.

And you're working with boys instead of girls, which I know sometimes language comes a little bit later for boys or the command of language, So I imagine it was a lot to differ.

Mean, they're friskier for the most part.

Oh for sure.

Yeah, they're sort of scattered. It was. It was a big change working with on set twin boys at the same time.

Yeah, did your same tricks work of the fruit, the dried fruit and the bracelets to make up. Well.

My sister Ronda at the time, who was also a studio teacher, we brought her.

Yes, and I think yeah, Ronda was working with Ashley Mary Kate as their.

Teacher and helping me coach the two boys. And so, I mean we would talk to them in the dressing room and they always wanted stories about band aids and monsters and sharks. And one time we're going out on the set to do a scene and I said, okay now, and I think it came across on the microphone. I said, okay, we're going to tiptoe like sharks. I don't know, I just made that up selection because they liked sharks.

Right.

My sister said, the audience is going to have no idea what you're talking about. I said, they shouldn't even listen to me.

You know, this is I'm working with babies. You do you have any idea? What kind of ridiculous has me?

I get up as I go along. You know, there was no set pattern. You just you shoot from the hip when you're working with right, That's what I had to do. There was a scene where we wanted to have the boys go from the crib and crawl out of the crib to walk, you know, because you know coddlers eventually do that.

Oh yeah, yeah, I've lived through that myself.

Trying to explain to them, they couldn't get it. I grabbed Ashley and I said, Ashley, get into the crib. She climbed into the crib. I said, and I want you to climb over the top and out of the crib, which she did. Then I put the little one in there. The boy did exactly what she did, so Ashley was able to help.

Me, and then their mom was forever pissed that we taught them how.

To crawl out of the crib.

After Full House ended, did you I mean, you know, like I was saying, you were working on on Hook and doing other movies and stuff part of the time, but not you know, you were full House was kind of where you were mostly. But what happened after the show did you wind up going with Ashley, Mary Kate or did what happened?

What happened next?

No, when the show ended, I had a falling out with the gentleman who represented them, Rob Wright, and so my connection with them ended abruptly by him. He did not want me working with them. So they went on to do a lot of these little music videos, and there were other studio teachers they used. I went back into the film world and did a number of feature films. After I did Jurassic I started doing some of the Jurassic Park movies. I think I did Jurassic Park and Jurassic three.

Oh.

My friend Stephen Ray Morris would die to hear that. He's such a huge Jurassic Park fan. I forgot you worked on that.

So I did that. I did Harry and the Henderson's. I did a really interesting film called Road to Perdition with Paul Newman and Daniel Craig. Ashley was in that too.

Oh.

It was a career that took me back into the feature film world, although I did do one other series. I did Two and a Half Men for four years, okay with Angus Jones. Yeah. Yeah. He had a real nice setup because we would do we would do I think three weeks on one week off, so we do three weeks in studio, and then that other week he would go back to his own school.

Right.

We did everything by fax machines. His school was voy cooperative, sent me all the work, so he was right on track. So yeah, I mean I went back into the feature from film World. I ended up getting married and my husband and I moved to Lake Tahoe for ten years we lived there, and then about four years ago, I moved back to Los Angeles. We sold the home in Tahoe, and my husband passed away unfortunately last year. So I've decided to work more. I actually have an assignment this week for a few days. And I don't know that I led you to tackle a series again, but I do work and enjoy working a few days a week still in the business. That's so great.

I love that, you know. It's funny.

I got my undergrad degree in like liberal studies with an emphasis in elementary education, and I actually wanted to be thought about being.

A studio teacher for a while.

I really, and I think I even may have talked to you or Laura about it and was trying to kind of get more information about what I needed. You know, what I would need to do and after I had graduated and stuff.

But it's it's such a delicate.

Balance because you like, you know, we said, you're you're there to protect the welfare of the kids and to teach them, but you also, you know, working within the craziness of this business, right like you have to be there to protect the kids and be like, no, this is what's happening. And I just always admired you for that. You you know, you took nobody's BSh.

It's all about the safety of the children. Safety.

And yeah.

So I mean when we were doing the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Kihi Kwan was my student who just won the Academy Award last year.

Wow, Yeah, excited for him.

There was a scene where he who he was about ten years old at the time, he had to run across this rope bridge over a three hundred foot gorge and it was built by engineers. It was a very safe rope bridge, but I wasn't comfortable with it. And he and Kate were supposed to run away from the bad guys across this rope bridge, and I was he was such a little thing and I was so afraid for him to be on that bridge, and they're ready to roll the camera. Stephen is ready to roll, and I said, well wait, I said, you know, I'm just I am not comfortable with him running across this bridge with no safety line. With this it's a three hundred foot drop into the gorge. So he said okay. So the special effects guy came in and he set up all these wires and he wired key to Kate Capshaw. Now, if he had fallen off the bridge, actually he probably would have taken her with him, taken her right, but at least he was wired to an adult. So I write safer. But Stephen was always great about that. If there was anything that I saw that concerned me, he would just stop and wait for it to be corrected.

And that's really great to hear because there are not everybody you know in this businesses like that. And it's he's done so many incredible movies with so many kids. Do you, I mean, have you stayed in contact with anybody else from from any of the movies that you've worked on.

I saw Drew Barrymore not too long away. That was great. In fact, I had lunch with Ashley last year and she's told me that she ran into Drew Barrymore at Fred Siegels years ago, and she said it's funny, actually said, I was so nervous to talk to Drew Barrymore, but I went up to her and said, you know, you and I had the same studio teacher. I know we did, you know, says her, that's so crazy.

I'm actually I'm I'm flying out to New.

York to go do Drew's show, so I will definitely mention. Yeah, I will definitely mention cool.

Oh. She was also great, great, you know, we had such a good time and full on the et. She was just just yeah. I remember when we finished the film and we went on a promotional tour. We flew into Oslo, Norway. She had never seen snow in her life, and I said, Drew, only you can have your first snow experience in Norway.

Right, Yeah, yeah, not the mountains of Big Bear, you know anything, but like, you go all the way to Norway to see snow.

He was a real person. She thought Et was alive. Et was her friend. But Stephen had the scene where E t he's in this like this contraption and he's he's done.

Oh, that all God, I'd still to this day.

So when he when he was doing that scene, he talked to Drew first and he said, so, this is a scene where Et is so so sick, he's going to die, and it's really sad. And the tears started to roll out of her eyes. And then Stephen went like this with his finger to roll camera. He didn't say action, he didn't sick, just right right, and they photographed Drew being so sad and crying over Et. And that was one of the magic tricks of that of that particular thing.

I was a huge Et fan as a kid. I used to I had the record of ET, and I would sit in bed with my grandmother who was staying at her house when I was like three years old, which was about when the movie came out, and she had broken her leg, and I would drag my little Fisher Price record player into her bed and I would sit there and we would listen to ET or you know, snow White or something. And I loved ET, but the scene where he screamed where he in the closet always freaked me out. And I was that part, so I would like grab onto her.

When Et screamed.

But I when I learned I had the same teacher as you know that did eat the movie ET, I was like.

I was very excited.

So I was, yeah, it was like, you just have had such an incredible career, and I.

You have been lucky, been really lucky. It's you know, I'll never mean, it's just this whole lifetime experience that I had in the film industry, which was kind of a fluke because I mean, I was a public school teacher and I went through a divorce and I was still teaching public school and going in at lunchtime into the lunch room and sitting with the other studio, the other school teacher ladies, talking about who got benched at recess, and I thought, there's got to be more to me than this, you know, just being in the lunch room with the school teacher ladies and being confined to one classroom and one school. And that's when I found out that they used teachers in Hollywood and started pursuing that direction. So I'm lucky, fortunate and was able to do some incredible projects, you know, in my years.

Ah, what was the most what was the most difficult age to teach?

On a set?

Elementary high school babies.

I think when you get first graders, you know, most of them were not like Jodi was in first grade. Some of them come having never experienced preschools, so they they're not sure about their alphabet, they're not sure about certainly not reading, or phonics or a math. And especially if you have a classroom where you have two or three or four. By law, you can have a studio teacher can have ten children in the classroom, but if you.

Have I remember like extra days when we would have you know, a classroom scene and we'd have Ronda would be there, a couple other teachers managing all the background kids.

Yeah, so it's difficult if you have first graders or second graders who need a lot of one on one instruction, especially when you have a first grader from Pasadena and you have another first grader from Santa Monica and they're not in the same schools, they're not at the same level, they can't do the same work. So I think it's more difficult working on jobs where you have multiple children at a very young age. The high school kids, and especially nowadays, I had to show a about two weeks ago, and they were all high school they all come with their laptops and they all have their linked into their school. In fact, now on set, you absolutely have to make sure that even when you're on location, which we were, you've got a Wi Fi set up, a Wi Fi right lock into the Wi Fi network, and the high school kids can work, you know, pretty independently. Yeah, so that makes you know, they can just raise their hand if they have a question about an assignment or a or a problem. But they're pretty independent for the most part, the junior high school and the high school kids.

Do you find that your students are probably like everyone all of the rest of us, much more distracted with technology and phones and all of that. I mean, I'm sure you know, I found a way to screw around in a classroom way before you know cell phones, So I'm sure that now they have those. It's you're like, can we please can you stop watching YouTube?

Well that that is one of the things on this project that I had a couple of weeks ago. We had all high school kids and you as a team. Sure, you have to walk the room, you have to con.

Right, Yeah, what are you actually doing on your monitor?

Right? Right?

Right? Stop scrolling at Sephora or looking at YouTube, Instagram, Snapchattle way, right, yeah.

How long have you been doing your podcast?

Six months? Seven months? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, we started it this summer.

We started from the very beginning and are watching each episode all the way through because we never watched it, right, we never, you know, we did it and then it was like, yeah, I know, I know how this one.

Ends, and it brings back so many men to watch myself watching ourselves as little kids. Oh my goodness, the fashion, the hairstyles, it was just it's it's such a treat to get to watch these episodes again and dissect them and make fun of yourselves and relive all these memories.

Oh gosh, yeah, now it's fun to make fun of ourselves when it was other people doing the making fun of not so much, but yeah, it's so much fun to go back.

And watch these and you know, again, Adria, you were.

You were such an important part of our childhood and growing up and you were Yeah, I just so many of my important childhood memories are with you. And I know my mom and you still stay close and talk, and she, you know, always jokingly says that you know, if you or her thinking about each other, one of you will eventually one of you calls almost you know you have this little sense, but I you have remained a big important part of my life to this day, and I just I love you for that.

And thank you for having the show. It was so much, so much.

You're so special to us. You're like a second mom and this is just such a gift. You're ready to talk to you today.

Love you, love you, love you, Bye bye.

Ashley Mary Kate always used to they couldn't say so.

They called her a.

That was so so sweetsh love. She is the same, She's exactly the same.

Adria has always been a badass like she has always been. And again, like somebody that I looked up to, a woman that like was like, Nope, this is.

What we're doing.

Like like she said, I saw there was more for me, and I just like, what an awesome influence to have in our lives at a young age of you know, someone like that that just like went for it and you know, and and was so wonderful and loving and like.

She she always had the kids' best interests at heart, and that wasn't just her job. I think she felt that intrinsically. She was just that's who she like, I'm an advocate for these kids, and she's going to stand up to even the harshest producer, not on our set, but on other set, since she's like.

I mean to Steven Spielberg, gonna be like this is not worth working for me.

That's the thing we were always you know, again, we had producers that never like took advantage of situations, but we all and I remember my mom saying I always knew Adria would jump in like you were not gonna do anything, no question, And it's so true, so true.

Oh so that was awesome, Such good feelings now, such warm fuzzies.

That was a really fun conversation with someone that is incredibly near and dear to our hearts. Adria was such an essential part of Full House and of our childhoods and growing up. We are so glad that you guys got to listen to our interview with her. She's just wonderful and I can't say it enough. So in the meantime, make sure you're following us on social media. You can follow us at how Rude Podcast on Instagram. You can also send us emails at howardpodcast at gmail dot com. Make sure that wherever you're listening to the podcast, you're liking and subscribing so that you can get all the newest episodes as they come out. And we will see you next week for another fun recap episode.

And in the meantime, everybody, remember the world is small, but the house is full.

A plus Jodi Sweeten, thank you, thank you.

It would be proud, Adrian would be proud. A plus for me.

Hey mm hmm.

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